The Next Horizon

by Chris Bonington

  If anything, it was worse than the previous night. Dense cloud surrounded us, and the wind, tearing blindly through it, made it impossible to tell the difference between wind-blown snow and cloud. Back in the hole I found Mick asleep, and gave him a prod to tell him that the storm was still raging outside. He just grunted, happy to be snug and warm inside his sleeping bag. It was nearly eight o’clock, and we had agreed to give Kleine Scheidegg a call on the hour, every hour, if possible. I switched on the set and listened to the crackle of static; then Pete came up, very weak and distorted, as if talking from another planet – which, in our present position, he might well have been doing, he in his centrally-heated bedroom, and we in our snow cave a thousand feet below the summit.

  ‘The Germans on the face got through last night,’ he told us. ‘They bivouacked in the Fly, but Lehne and Strobel fixed a lot of rope yesterday, and reckon they got somewhere just below the summit ice-field. They think they’ll get out today.’

  ‘Sounds great. We’ll try to get up there ourselves. It’s bloody desperate up here.’

  ‘Have you got enough food?’ asked Peter. ‘We were worried when we found all that gear you left behind in the helicopter.’

  ‘We’re fine, thanks, specially if they get out today. Open up every hour, so that we can get you back if we want you.’

  ‘Okay. Have a good trip. Over and out.’

  We were on our own again. I couldn’t help worrying that the Germans and Dougal might have got up early and, at that moment, could even be at the summit. This being the case, I would have missed my great opportunity of getting summit photographs. Quickly, I prodded Mick into wakefulness, got the stove going, and an hour later we were packed, ready to go. At this stage I thought we were only a few hundred feet below the summit, but once we started climbing, it became increasingly evident that we were very much lower. It was a savage day, much worse than the previous one, for the wind seemed even stronger and almost impossible to face into, because of the way ice particles were driven into our faces. It was also an almost total whiteout, impossible to tell where the driving snow ended and the mountain began. We just picked our way through it, groping blindly upwards in an enclosed world of our own. It was exciting, stimulating work. A steep snow slope led up to broken rocks covered in snow, then to a wall of hard, green ice, up which I had to cut my way, all the time battered by the wind. Mick was a good companion, always ready with a touch of dry Lancastrian humour, whenever he caught up with me in this world of snow and cloud and wind.

  We reached the summit. Had the others been and gone? There were no signs, but there probably wouldn’t be anyway. We found a piece of hard, frozen orange peel, jammed between two rocks. Gazing down the steep ice-field of the North Face, we shouted, but the words, torn from our mouths by the rushing wind, were dissipated in the air-blown snow. It was difficult to believe that anyone could survive there, let alone complete a high-standard climb.

  We ourselves were beginning to freeze, exposed as we were to the full blast of the wind.

  ‘We’ll have to find somewhere to snow-hole,’ I told Mick. ‘Come on, we’ll drop down till we can find enough snow to dig in.’

  We tried to keep as close as possible to the crest of the ridge, so that we could look over and peer into the mist and snow, in a vain hope of seeing the others. About 500 feet below, we found a bank of snow sufficiently deep to dig a cave. It was high time, for by now we were frozen to the bone, and I had lost all sensation in my feet. Once in the hole, we got out the wireless and called Gillman.

  ‘We can’t see anything down here,’ he told me. ‘I haven’t managed to get any information from the Germans, either. I’ll go over now – what’s it like up there?’

  ‘Bloody desperate. Let us know as soon as possible what progress the others have made.’

  Mick and I got our boots off, massaged our feet, and then climbed into sleeping bags. Fully expecting the Germans to arrive at the summit at the same time as ourselves, we had left all the food at the other snow hole. We now realised that we had only two teabags, no sugar, and a bar of chocolate – pitifully little to keep us going in these conditions.

  An hour went by, and I switched on the walky-talky. Pete came up after a few minutes, sounding even more distant and distorted than on the previous call. We had to ask him to repeat what he was saying, over and over again, to get any sense out of the confused jumble of words. Eventually we gathered that, a couple of hours earlier, Jorg Lehne and Dougal had reached a point just below the summit ice-field. This meant they could be at the top in the next hour or so. Immediately closing down the set, Mick and I struggled to get back into our frozen outer garments. It was like trying to put on suits of armour. Out we went, up towards the summit. Each time I went out, I had felt that the weather couldn’t possibly get worse, and each time it had. Hardly able to stand against the force of the wind, we certainly could not face into it. Slowly, we crawled up to the top, where we looked over the edge and into the face, where we could see nothing except whirling snow and ice dropping away into the abyss. Having stayed there for half an hour, at the end of which time we were scarcely able to move, it was time to return to the comfort of the snow hole. At least we had a retreat, but what of the climbers on the face? What had they? While we snuggled in our sleeping bags, Dougal was abseiling down frozen ropes to the place where two of the Germans had prepared a bivouac site. Gunther Strobel had come up to the high point, carrying Jorg Lehne’s and his own bivouac gear, so that they could bivouac where they were, leaving Dougal to return to the bottom, where his gear had been left with the other pair. He spent the night wrapped up in a bivouac sack, his sleeping bag already frozen solid from the previous night. His stance was too small for him to even contemplate taking off his boots, though he did succeed in removing his crampons and, in doing so, perhaps saved his feet from frostbite.

  It must have been a long, cruel night, though talking to Dougal afterwards, one could see that he had derived the same strange enjoyment from an extreme situation as I had experienced that day in wandering around the top of the Eiger in the tempest.

  We woke at dawn and lay in our sleeping bags, with nothing to do but wonder about the fate of our friends on the face. It seemed they could have little chance of survival in a storm as savage as this. Outside, the wind was as fierce as ever, with visibility as low. I switched on the wireless at 6 a.m. and Peter told me that three of the Germans, together with Toni Hiebeler (a member of the team which made the first winter ascent of the North Wall of the Eiger by its original route), were going to try to reach us, to bring us more food, and enough rope to lower someone down the face to try to help the climbers trapped on it. It was obvious that Pete couldn’t hear my reply, and he ended up by telling me to press the send switch of the radio three times as affirmative and twice for negative, in reply to his questions. We, of course, unable to ask him anything, did gather that the Germans’ radio had also failed, leaving Peter with no idea of their progress.

  Having had practically nothing to eat on the previous day, we now ate two cubes of the chocolate left from the bar we had brought with us from the lower snow hole. We discussed the possibility of searching for our previous home, but quickly abandoned the idea. We could never have found it in the near whiteout conditions we were experiencing. Although I dreaded the thought of another struggle to the summit, our consciences finally drove us out. We fought our way through the driving snows to a point where we could overlook the summit ice-field. No sign of anyone. We could try, however, to get a higher snow hole, and to this end we started poking about. It was late afternoon when there came a shout from below. I looked down, and saw Karl Golikow, grinning as always, in spite of the blizzard and the seven-hour struggle which they had experienced in fighting their way up to our assistance. He got out his walky-talky and spoke to the base camp man, talking fast and excitedly; then he hammered me on the back.

  ‘They are nearly up,’ he shouted against the wind. We abandoned the snow hole and crawled
up to the top as fast as we could. Jorg Lehne and Gunther Strobel had just arrived, their faces masked in icicles. Jorg looked surprisingly fit, but Gunther, moving like a sleep-walker, was obviously badly frost-bitten. Grabbing hold of them we shook hands, and thumped them on their backs in our pleasure at seeing them alive. They had fought their way out of the grasp of the face and the weather, entirely unaided. They had, they told us, left fixed ropes behind them for the others to follow, and we helped and guided them back down, towards the other Germans who were now coming up towards us.

  We didn’t know then, that Dougal was struggling for his very life. There was one section where Jorg had run out of rope, and had left a gap of about a hundred feet. Dougal and the two Germans had no ice-axes – not even an ice-hammer. This was all right as long as they were following up the fixed ropes left by the lead pair. But now there was a gap, without even a trace of the steps they must have cut in the ice, for these had all been filled in by the driving snow. His crampons had become loose, and he was unable to tighten the straps because they had frozen into bands like strips of steel. The lead pair had disappeared and he could not even see the top of the ice-field though, in actual fact, he was only about 300 feet below it.

  There was no point in staying where he was – all three of them would have died, and so he started out, on what must have been the most difficult lead of the entire climb. He moved, clearing the snow with his gloved hands until he found traces of the steps cut by the others; stepped up into them cumbrously, yet so carefully, always uncomfortably aware that if he did slip he would almost certainly pull the pair below off their stances and that they would all fall to their deaths.

  He came to the top of the line of steps. The end of the rope had been blown about twenty feet to one side, and between him and the rope was a smooth ice slope, canted at about 50 degrees. In trying to balance across on the front points of his crampons, he found they were so loose on his boots, so blunt after weeks of climbing, that he obviously had no hope of getting across.

  Most climbers would have given up, or made a mistake, faced with such an appalling situation. Dougal did not, and in solving the problem survived and, at the same time, displayed his own genius as a mountaineer. The only hope seemed to be a tension traverse. To complete this manoeuvre you hammer in a piton, clip in a karabiner, and then swing across, almost horizontally, relying on the side tension of the rope to hold you in. Dougal had a piton – the ice-dagger which was his only aid; he had no hammer, but did have a Hiebeler clamp, a little lever of light alloy. He tried to hammer in the piton with this, but it only went in about an inch, then moved from side to side in its hole with frightening ease. It certainly would not have held a fall, and it was highly doubtful whether it could even have taken the strain of a tension traverse.

  As Dougal worked his way across, leaning against the rope, placing his feet very, very carefully, he was well aware that a slip meant a plummeting fall of 6,000 feet for both himself and the two others. But having managed to get across, he seized the rope, fastened his own climbing rope to it, and then climbed up towards the summit.

  I got back to the top just in time to see him moving up those last few feet. I don’t think I have ever been so glad to see anyone in the mountains, as I was to see him. My pleasure and emotion did not stop me taking photographs, although the cold very nearly did. My first camera froze solid and I had another half-frame camera round my neck but that was frozen as well. My last resort was yet another camera, which I had wrapped in a down jacket in my sleeping bag. It worked, and pointing it in the general direction of Dougal, I got half a dozen pictures of him as I manipulated the rewind and trigger with frozen fingers. When my fingers began to go white, I stopped, sucked my hands in my mouth until I got a bit of life back into them, and then shot a few more.

  And then back down to the snow hole, moving slowly and cautiously, fearful that after so much had happened, now, in sight of safety, we should have another accident. There were shouts of pleasure as we thrust ourselves into the cosy confines of the hole. That morning it had barely been large enough for Mick and me, but the Germans had enlarged it slightly, until it was just big enough for four. Eleven of us were now crammed into it – there was no room to move, certainly insufficient to get into sleeping bags. A gas stove was purring in the back, someone had a flask of schnapps, and we laughed and joked in our relief at the face team’s success and, more to the point, at just being alive. Toni Hiebeler, jammed in the back of the cave, complained of suffocation as the air became thick with smoke and lack of oxygen; I took off Dougal’s boots to massage his feet, which seemed cold, but were not frost-bitten. His hands, however, were in a bad way, being covered in great black blisters.

  The dawn crept in, and we packed rucksacks. One by one, we squeezed out of the snow cave for the last leg down to Scheidegg – back down to newspaper men, flash bulbs, TV lights, but more important than any of this, as far as I was concerned, to Wendy. Once in the hotel, Mick Burke and I peeled off our boots, Mick grumbling that his were soaked. Rather self-satisfied about my own, which were a different make, I remarked:

  ‘Mine are bone dry. My feet haven’t been really cold once, during the whole business. You should throw those away and get a pair of these.’

  By this time I was down to my socks, pulled these off to gaze at five blackened toes. I had been frost-bitten without even realising it. Mick and I collapsed into near-hysterical laughter at the come-down from my own pomposity – laughter that was short-lived. A brain surgeon, having a holiday in Scheidegg, volunteered his services and prescribed an injection in the artery in the fleshy part of my thigh. He spent over an hour trying to locate it, digging away with his needle until, eventually, Wendy who was holding my hand began to feel sick and faint, and even my own very limited level of stoicism ran out. We fled from the hotel that night to Interlaken, where there was a hospital. Wendy tearfully left me there to get back to Conrad in England. She had by now been separated from him for three weeks.

  I managed to escape from the hospital after three days of boredom. The climb was over – eight weeks of intense excitement, tragedy, superb climbing, farce and the inevitable circus atmosphere that the Eiger always seems to encourage. The climb, undoubtedly controversial, excited criticism in both the popular press and in mountaineering circles. It was said that unfair means had been used to conquer an Alpine face. An extract from a British newspaper article sums up a surprisingly widely held opinion. ‘In early March the circus came to Scheidegg again and we were subject to the ballyhoo that now accompanies each North Wall climb … Certainly the courageous contestants were supreme technicians but some of them came down to Scheidegg to sleep at nights and this bears no more relation to climbing than taking a plane to Petersgrat does to ski mountaineering. One Wengen guide was heard to declare that he could have dragged his grandmother up the network of fixed ropes … ’

  Even amongst experienced mountaineers there was a feeling that it was wrong to use expedition tactics in the Alps. I am convinced that the climb could not possibly have been completed by any other method that winter; it is quite possible that given the ten days of perfect weather that John had hoped for, they would have completed the climb as they had planned by conventional Alpine methods, but even so the likelihood of the weather breaking before they reached the top would have been so great, that I do not think an Alpine-type assault was, or would be, justified in winter.

  Neither team planned the long-drawn-out assault that occurred – their frequent returns to Scheidegg both for rest and supplies were forced on them by the circumstances of bad weather. I do not think that this action caused a particularly dangerous precedent in the history of Alpine climbing; just because these methods were used on one climb, because they were expedient, does not mean that they are going to be used on every subsequent first winter ascent or new route done in the Alps – apart from anything else, it is much more enjoyable going straight on to a climb and getting up it.

  Only a few people would
deny that the Eiger Direct was a great line, whatever methods were used to climb it. To the people who climbed on it, it became more than just a climb; it was a place where twelve people of different nationalities came together and from initial distrust and competition built up a very real friendship and understanding under stress and extreme difficulties. This friendship had been forged before John’s tragic death – the two teams would have reached the top together in unqualified victory but for the breaking of a rope.

  More important from a personal point of view, perhaps, there is the solid balance of experience that has enabled me, and the others who survived, to go on to tackle other challenges in the mountains and, in my own case, along different paths of adventure journalism. Alongside, is the loss of a powerful personality and brilliant climber – one more name to be added to an ever-growing list of close friends who have died in the mountains, doing something they wanted above all to do, for reasons that none of us have fully succeeded in defining.

  – CHAPTER FOURTEEN –

  SANGAY FROM THE EAST

  My backside had never been so sore. I shifted in the wooden saddle, but this merely altered the point of pain as the mule I was riding took each jerky step through the morass of mud that pretended to be a path. A trickle of rain ran down my back, unpleasantly chill for the tropics. There was water everywhere, weeping from the grey sky, pounding on the foliage, cascading from the ceiling of leaves above us; it rushed in a brown foaming torrent over the entanglement of dead branches and leaves that covered the floor of the forest.